Inleiding René Jansen, voorzitter van de raad van bestuur van de Kansspelautoriteit, bij het webinar 'Outsourcing requirements for operators and third-party suppliers', georganiseerd door Gaming in Holland, 24 februari 2021.
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is good to see everyone, even if it is online. Although I am starting to get used to it, I still hope we will be able to meet in person someday soon.
I am glad I can address you today, but I am also very much looking forward to the Gaming in Holland Conference later this year. Willem van Oort invited me to deliver the keynote speech at that conference. Naturally, I accepted the invitation. Hopefully, it will be an in-person meeting again.
The timing of the Gaming in Holland conference later this year is great, by the way. It will be held on 1 October, the same day that the Dutch market for legal online gambling is set to open! This will make 2021 a historic year for Dutch gambling policy.
I have said it before: this policy was in dire need of modernisation. An important step is now being taken in this direction. But first, we – both operators and the Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) – will be entering the stage of processing licence applications. They can be submitted from 1 April onwards,
unless you must comply with the rules on the cooling-off period. As you know, the the critical date related to this is 1 July 2018: operators may not have offered specifically and actively their gambling services to Dutch consumers after that date. Operators who did so nevertheless, will not be eligible for this first licensing round. And allow me to use this occasion today, to state clearly that after 1 April the Ksa will keep a watchful eye on the market behaviour of those operators whom we would expect to be influenced by our policy rule on the cooling-off period.
As you all know by now, on 1 April, the Remote Gambling Act (Wet Koa) will come into force. This law is formally an extension of and amendment to the Betting and Gambling Act (Wok). “At last”, you might say; after such extensive and time-consuming preparations. Originally, once the Remote Gambling Act had been passed by the Senate in February 2019, we expected to be able to process licence applications by mid-2020. However, the subordinate legislation was not yet ready. And when it was, we had to wait for the recommendations of the Council of State.
Anyway, 1 April is now the definite date. This is not a joke, despite it being the traditional date in the Netherlands for pulling pranks on one another. We are certainly not going to do that.
As you may have seen, we have published a lot of documents on our website in recent weeks. We have published new versions of the Policy Rules for Licensing under the Remote Gambling Act and Policy Rules concerning Responsible Gambling. Among other things, these rules state that, when registering players, you may not use any customer data that you already had before receiving a licence from the Ksa. Also, in your consumer recruitment and advertising activities, you may not use any personal data obtained from players participating in gambling which had not yet been licensed. We will have a close supervision on these obligations after issuing licences. If necessary, enforcement will take place.
Besides new versions of policy rules, a new version of the assessment scheme for gaming systems was also released. In January, we announced that not all documents need to be initially enclosed with the application. This was in response to signals from the market – from you – that this would be too strict a requirement. Of course, the Ksa is willing to listen. If the application is received by us by 15 April, among other things, the summary test reports for each part of the gaming system must be in our possession by 1 July 2021.
In that case, we expect that it will still be possible – in the event of a positive decision, of course – to grant you a licence that will take effect on 1 October this year. The application must, however, already include a complete description of the gaming system.
All of this information is available on our website. Keep a close eye on it in the coming period as well. The nearer we get to 1 April, the more information you will find there.
Your topic this afternoon is outsourcing. I can make the following general remarks about this. The most important point of all is that licencees will remain responsible at all times. Unlike the United Kingdom, for example, the Dutch legislator has not chosen to subject a licence requirement to companies to whom services have been outsourced. In many cases, companies in the UK performing outsourced services must have a business-to-business (B2B) licence. Gambling operators must have a business-to-consumer (B2C) licence.
In the Netherlands, this is arranged differently: only B2C licences exist for the gambling market. This means that future licensees are responsible for ensuring that the companies you outsource to, meet the requirements set out in the new Betting and Gambling Act and in the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Prevention) Act (Wwft). If you are an operator, you must have a policy in place for this. In other words, you must be able to demonstrate that the companies you are outsourcing to are just as reputable as you are.
This is what I would like to say about this subject for now. I wish you all a pleasant and instructive afternoon. And as I said earlier, I hope to see you in person on 1 October. I would now like to hand over again to Willem. Thank you very much!